


The Only Death That Matters

by FuchsiaMae



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2019-08-22 17:42:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16602608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FuchsiaMae/pseuds/FuchsiaMae
Summary: Aperture has always been a place of death. This time, it counts.(Originally posted to Tumblr 5/3/14)





	The Only Death That Matters

She says goodbye again, and again, and again.

She’d always thought of death as sudden. A missed step, a stray bullet, a scream, a thud. Not painless, but quick. She’d blink and it was over – test was finished, results collected, staff dispatched to clean up the mess. Just one heartbeat and it was done.

Not like this. Never like this.

It’s so slow she can almost pretend it isn’t happening. Almost. Until she sees an old photograph and fails to recognize the man in the hospital bed. She’s losing him, as much as he’s losing her. There are days when he can’t pin a name to her face. There are days when she can’t fit this hollow face to his name. 

Cave Johnson.

His once booming voice now wheezes and rasps. His proud broad shoulders stoop in pain. His laugh turns to coughing. He’s forgotten his smile.

She hasn’t. At times she wishes she could.

Cave Johnson, the man she knew all those years ago, is gone now – almost.  _Almost_. And that almost is the worst of all. Because every so often, once in every long while, a spark of him will light behind the old man’s tired eyes. Just a flicker. But enough.

Enough to keep her hoping.

She wishes she could stop hoping. 

Death – this death, the only one that matters out of so many in this place – is painful and slow. She knows that now. Death is the long, slow torture of tearing away everything he is, until nothing but bones is left behind. A frail body on the white sheets. A shell that once held the man she loved. 

Every day he’s weaker, sicker, further from her reach. Any day could be the end.

She can’t tell whether that means terror or relief. 

It means death. Death is both. 


End file.
